Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Shift keys not working in Ubuntu

I've had a strange problem on my Dell Dimension 9200 where the shift keys didn't work in Ubuntu (10.10) but ONLY in Ubuntu.
I have four other OSes on this machine and in all of the others (Windows 7, Haiku, Mac OS X i86 and FreeBSD 8.2) the shift keys worked perfectly.
So, it's not the keyboard.
I really tried everything to resolve this annoyance over several weeks but to no avail.
Finally I came across this thread (post #7) that helped me get rid of it.
The thread was written in 2008 when Desktop controls were a little different to what they are now.
What I did was:

Preferences>General>Commands>Key Bindings

and found that "Run command 0" was bound to Shift+F19.
Once I had disabled this command, the shift keys started working perfectly again.
This seems like a bug. Certainly my computer, nor any that I've ever seen, has a F19 key.

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